Entries tagged with scrivener

1. Post about something that made you happy today, even if it’s just a small thing.
2. Do this everyday for eight days without fail.
~~3. Tag eight of your friends to do the same~~ (Feel free to do it, but don’t feel obliged.)

Eight days? Can I find something that makes me happy every day for eight days? Well, I can find three today, so that’s a good start.

1. Tuskan Bean Soup. (In the style of Darth Vader.)

I tried making a Slimming World recipe soup for lunch – Tuscan Bean soup. Either the recipe meant 1.2 pints of water rather than the 1.2 litres it actually said, or some people really like their soups to taste of Dickensian gruel. This did not make me happy.

But the Beecroft is not so easily beaten by watery food products! So I stuck in a carton of passata, twice the amount of macaroni, a splash of Worcester sauce and a dollop of Peri-Peri sauce, changed the name – because it was now hot as a Tatooine desert – and presto! It was suddenly one of the best soups I’ve ever had, while still being fully Slimming World compliant. This did

Pah! You people who think slimming food has to be thin and tasteless, I defy you all!

2. Live daughter.

Eldest phoned to say she was safely on Kos and not dead in a plane crash/dead in a coach crash/dead in a boat sinking, as I had feared since she left (yesterday) for her first ever holiday away from the family/country, with nary a responsible adult on hand. She’s 18 now, and is supposed to be a responsible adult herself. Learning that she was not dead made me very happy.

3. Scrivener is silly.

When you plot with scrivener’s plotting cards, they make you give each card a title. They don’t give you much space for it, so if you want to see the whole thing, you have to keep it short. If you then click on the chapter heading, all of the titles of your cards come up, in a brief, laconic summary of the plot. This week’s chapter made me laugh:

Radu makes a bad first impression
Enter the vampires
Radu has embarrassing parents
Everything gets a bit dub-con
Frank blames himself.

Possibly I have been reading too much fanfiction recently

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

I’ve held out for a long time against all this advice (indeed against the downright assumption) that all writing ought to be done in scenes.

“But I write in chapters!” I cried. “Why should I bother with fiddly little bits of scenes when I can see the whole chapter in one lump and just work from that?”

Then I thought “well, I’ll just try out Scrivener, everyone raves about it so.”

Scrivener is set up so that you do your plotting on virtual note cards. A single note card isn’t big enough to hold all the stuff that goes on in a chapter (unless your chapters are very small indeed.) And presto, I found myself plotting in smaller chunks. Then I found that my smaller chunks corresponded to segments of about 1000-1500 words.

Suddenly I knew how many cards I had to fill to create a story of any given length. Wow! I didn’t even realise I needed to know that until I knew it.

Plus, I can do 1000-1500 words in a go, which means I can write one (oh, God, let’s just surrender and call it a…) scene in a writing session. And that means I can cross off at least one card every day.

Which means I know how long it’s going to take me to write any project. 60 scenes = at most 60 days = 60,000-90,000 words.

All of which gives me such a heady sense of control you wouldn’t believe it. Plus, there’s the instant reward and gratification – the daily sense of achievement – of making measurable progress.

Sometimes, in the middle of a novel, it feels as if I’ve been going forever and there’s still forever left to go – that I’ll be stuck like one of those anxiety dreams, driving, driving, never able to find the turn off or get home. With this, every day the scenes left to write will be going down. I’ll know how many days I have to go. I won’t have to panic and run around tearing at my hair and ranting about how impossible it all is and how I ought to just pack it in and take up bonsai forestry instead.

I may still do so anyway, because that’s just me. But here and now I throw up my hands in a melodramatic manner and admit that OK, you did tell me. No, I know I didn’t listen, but yes, you were right. Scenes may actually be a very similar thing to sliced bread.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Happiness meme, caught from Joans23

Surrendering to Scenes